Preload Pages

mib2berlin

Hi, does anybody know if the setting does anything in Vivaldi?

I guess the Vivaldi browser does not send pages to a Vivaldi server but it should not send them to Google, what this setting does in Chrome for example, either.

Cheers, mib

Pathduck

@mib2berlin Interesting question, and I've never really thought about this Chromium setting before.

It seems to be enabled by default, but I have no idea if it works "as intended". Maybe it's the same as the "prefetch" which has been a feature in Chromium for a long time. Here's a pretty detailed article I found:
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/02/preload-what-is-it-good-for/
Gets very technical and developer-centric.

But reading that, it doesn't really sound like the same as "preload pages" which sounds more like whole pages are loaded and cached?

Vivaldi replaces "Chrome/Google" with "Vivaldi" in the settings and this might be confusing. The original text is:

"Preloads pages that Chrome thinks you might visit. To do this, Chrome may use cookies, if you allow cookies, and may encrypt and send pages through Google to hide your identity from sites."

So that sounds pretty bad from a privacy perspective.

In chrome://settings/preloading in Chrome 114, it is more advanced:

That definitely sounds like "Extended preloading" is bad for privacy.

In my default snapshot install, uBlock just disables it.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dashboard:-Settings#disable-prefetching

This is difficult to know for sure. I would think that Vivaldi does not send anything through Google, and that this feature is simply enabled but doesn't actually do much?

I think only @yngve might be able to answer this?

yngve

First of all, this would probably not work at all, since the access requires an API key to be sent that has that functionality enabled. Our key does not have that enabled.

Regarding the text, as I explained in https://vivaldi.com/blog/news/the-trouble-with-chromium-translations/ , we do search&replace of Google&co to Vivaldi. Sometimes that have rather weird or wrong results. Sometimes we fix those by replacing the string with one of our own.

In any case, I just disabled the feature prefs by default, disabled the prefs sections, and pointed the URLs at our 404 server just in case.

Pathduck

@yngve said in Preload Pages:

First of all, this would probably not work at all, since the access requires an API key to be sent that has that functionality enabled. Our key does not have that enabled.

Makes sense, thanks for clearing that up

In any case, I just disabled the feature prefs by default, disabled the prefs sections, and pointed the URLs at our 404 server just in case.

What URLs were they originally pointing to? I'm just curious

yngve

@Pathduck said in Preload Pages:

What URLs were they originally pointing to?

There were URLs like tunnel.googlezip.net

@Pathduck said in Preload Pages:

I'm just curious

You do know what happened to the cat, right? Ducks are not protected either, when they stray from the path.

Pathduck

@yngve said in Preload Pages:

Ducks are not protected either, when they stray from the path.

I know - this colleague of mine was investigating the labour practices of Amazon and disappeared, only to be found in the harbour two days later. Very sad story...

I'll be weewy weewy caweful...